Red moon, blue sea, empty house

the hopeless and interminable feeling of artistic surges over in an expressive force, like the desire to speak to the boy who was left alone too long. left alone far too long and without a letter. the impression that stifles every refined word that i could drum up but haven’t learned, any project or open-road is closed-off by my idea of tomorrow’s hours, all-accounted and necessary, obligations and seasonal rifts. i wonder if tonight, the copper moon will cast a crooked shadow on a buckled sidewalk crack and let me see the trees and tiny snow flakes, burning against the full highland sky, heath freezing over like a weaving of icicles. and i could see stones moving in ghostly shapes, and what would it mean if i saw a face? a human face? this heavy and blunt despair falls away into the absurd gray hues of this computer screen and the wall opposite me and the person across the room, even shadows have lost their mystery–they wear the weight of bored and hunched shoulders.

i can only think by what i cannot say, i have no words that are mine and i don’t have the practice or precision to form them against the uniformity of a shaping knife. blind, surging spirit and feeling have spilled me out somewhere from first high, and now i spin a rabble of trash into glass, inviting others inside.

i still swell up like a bloated fish against the pitfalls of a well conditioned routine. everyday commonality is a phrase that means banality and my community has poisoned itself with false, fleeting dreams that are always smoking off glowing embers somewhere over the horizon–the romantic volcano would burn us in the street if we came too close to it. and oh, how we love our feet and fingers.

we see that we are on the land above the sea. we walk on water not by faith but by stones, pavement poured over and into the water like shell mounds that will not die.

and i am polluted by agreeing to regurgitate words before i’ve understood them. i stand choking above a toilet just after the second course– gagging and nauseated but i signed up for more, more, more, for the promise of more.

it’s clear to me, the politics of continuing the meal: we fall away from praxis and push it further still by force, pointing out until we have become masters of self-deception, of proving lacksis. we reaffirm just what we tell ourselves we patiently wait to fight against. we sit weak and sick on our own acids, at the grand meal of tastefully selected paradise in the dumps of New Jersey, where even the tomatoes are grown in cement.

more, more, more;

it was perhaps the worst slogan–
“WE WANT EVERYTHING,”

of course you do.

Alluvial fans in deep space

Yesterday was Rutgersfest. The streets were flooded with drunk college kids. Everyone wanted to have a good time, and from their perspective, it was a bit like a festival. But from an outside (a sober) vantage, there was no atmosphere and we were all in a vacuum. In the bar (my friend wanted to celebrate her new position for 2011 Model Congress), there were a bunch of too-cool-for-graduate-school folks in flannel shirts and some sad middle aged Jersey folks. And that was the alternative to three inch heels and satin tube dresses, a repeat track of hip-hop blasting out of silver and black cars; everyone living out the movie or the music video.

There is something terrifying about self-involvement; if you look around for too long the force of silences in old-time public spaces (now storefronts and human deltas outside of bars) is almost enough to crush you. And then, on the walk down George street home, through the housing projects, a man with his friends violently screamed something out about our being females, and if he could have gone to college he would have raped us–how dare we walk on the sidewalk.

And that’s the state of it. A tuition “rally” three weeks ago where the top number was 75 participants. And who the fuck wants to organize like a bunch of buffoons, anyway? Being underground in this town means having a basement show at a secret location to avoid the noise complaints. And there’s nothing past the loud vibrations and the beer and the hipster-clothes. Being “political” means that you join Tent State, and having a message begins and ends with Che shirts.

At the Press, I see endlessly erudite pieces of scholarship, gotta hand it to ‘em, right? But there’s still a part of me that still says fuck you to erudition on thee history of the Platform Sutra in Chinese culture from 600-1000. There’s a part of me that is ashamed of the split between a life of art and a life of scholarship that so often takes the form of and M.F.A. or a P.h.D.

It all seems like emptiness. It seems like hopelessness; my best friend got kicked out of Starbucks for pamphleting. The cafes are fascists now, too. But more strongly than despair do I feel, with some alien sixth sense, that there are new cracks, new underground currents, the dream of a utopia lives on.

But where? But where?

On gratitude

If I might master one new sector of living in philosophy or more realistically of living philosophy within the institution of the academy, it is to learn to learn with grace. Often times when I reach out to others who could teach me so much if they liked, and whose blindspots I might also catch, the asked puts on an arrogant mask of erudition. No one wants to use simple terms (even me and this must also change) and few are willing to condescend to the real level of the conversation. What I mean is, in most peer academic situations, all participants are hell-bent on making the *most* obtuse and tangential references, whether or not they orbit the topic at hand. And I continue to wonder why the “left” is so far in its pathetic little corner! Learning not to know all things (and accepting that my pretensions only fragment any real possibility even more) and learning how to listen might actually change the everyday life of more than one pseudo-educated state college student.

What does Zizek mean when he says “philosophy is not a conversation?”

Philosophy might not be a conversation in the sense that it is not up for discussion; better yet, that the philosophy as truth is not up for discussion. I hate to use terms that I’m not sure of, but here I think of philosophy (or a philosophical moment) as a moment that is more than individual that speaks of the universal (as B/Z remember as something like “god”). Philosophy, or truth, is not up for debate in the conventional means. Philosophy as “god” characterizes exactly the foreignness that proves it to be always applicable and always apart from the event.

But then, in the middle of Zizek’s portion of the book, foreignness becomes a matter of human rights, or reclaiming an aspect of “the human” without being confined to the silly limits of cultural relativism (I am thinking here of his essay “Against Human Rights” that appeared in the New Left Review, though I forget the specific publication date.)

Because what I think Zizek is saying when he writes “Against Human Rights” is that the liberal notion of the term in the United States depends on the fundamental division of people into hierarchies, and the people at the bottom (and it is a very big bottom) are actually so far from the normal ideals of first world dignity (that is always immediately protected) that it must be remembered and forcefully cloaked onto the second and third worlds.

We must condescend to remind them of their origins as human (of the rights that we grant them but do not protect) in order to play-out the primitive Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau rigmarole of before civilization.

Here is an example from the History Channel: on a program called “Strange Rituals,” the episode transitioned from the ancient Celtic agrarian sacrifices to revenge killings. During the revenge killing segment, there were two plots, one narrative, and the first enveloped the second.  The first plot-indigenous group (Yanomami Tribe) in the Amazon that practices stringent “reciprocity” tactics in warfare, followed by the Danny Greene story in 1976 Cleveland. The Amazon tribe is treated as the “before civilization” anchor for the Danny Greene bit, which is to say “the Danny Greene story speaks of some pre-historic urge for reciprocal living as demonstrated by our pre-historic contemporaries, the barbaric, the most basic kind of human beings, the Yanomami.”

The narrative was “human nature” and the first plot defined the precondition of barbarism and the second made sure to invoke this pre-historic barbarism as more than an isolated incident in post-war America. The parallel insinuates that organized crime and its effects are not products of real economic and social disparity, but that one man’s isolated actions depicted an eruption of primal violence that break through the otherwise benign processes of society. This is a negative example of human rights– here there is no discussion of the rights of the Yanomami, only of the individuals in Cleveland. But it exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of the liberal notion of human rights.

It exposes the assumption that people other than first world people must be reminded of their status as human, and we must be reminded, ourselves (although we would never admit this). Human rights, in the liberal sense, are granted on the basis of potential-being-human (we grant them humanity before they figure out what it is and how to get it,  just as we eventually figured it all out) and this status absolutely undermines any possibility that they ever really were humans. [Along with this comes pity and the all too obvious solution that we must each found/support NGO's to help the others transition and cross over into humanity. Their human rights are placeholders for what will become a private life and their "choice" to make money, develop, etc.]

When Zizek says that philosophy is not a conversation, I think he means that philosophy is not up for debate. Truth is not up for debate or refutation. One can tap into it, follow its legacy and its challenges without refuting its existence.

I might not know the truth, but that certainly doesn’t change that it exists.

Opening paragraph of my paper–

The public university system has reached its critical mass. That it is a consumer-producing machine, a wilted vestibule filled with misguided students if they can still be so-called, is a possibility. In fact, it is a probability: students are churned out of the public university—for the most part—as swiftly and as systematically as did trade schools thirty years ago; as boot-camps have always done. No longer does the student enter the public university to learn how to think. No longer, because the time spent as an undergraduate is more and more clearly a placeholder, an extension of the heavy middle-classist high school education. Not even a trade school or a high school, the public university appears as some sort of ideological purgatory: a clash of the “practical” and the lofty nostalgia passed down from the sixties. “Communiqué from an Absent Future” was written and circulated at the University of Santa Cruz in response to severe budget cuts that virtually anesthetized many of the UC branches.[1] The pamphlet renounces the bureaucratic public university in the most vague terms, calling for an immediate insurgency in all public areas to “push the university struggle to its limits” but refuses any structural reform. The object of the pamphlet then, is blatantly anarchist although it refuses to view itself as such. It wantonly refers to Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach demanding change in the same vapidly ambiguous manner as in 2008; it urges students across the country (perhaps the world) to tear the seam of time and space within capitalism, with the hopes that this aimless insurrectionist approach will spontaneously overthrow all capitalist institutions along with the governments that support them. It will of course succeed by simple virtue of interrupting the flow of the public university. And because of this hackneyed approach the CAF comes up short. Today, in this late stage of capitalism, grandiose calls for the abolition of wage-labor, the abolition of the university (the public university, at that), the state, and the bank in one unified, spontaneous foul swoop, is ridiculous. The contest between reform and revolution in Marx’s day was problematic; but today, there can be no serious discussion of anarchic revolution, unless its leaders’ wish merely to stand on a couch in the student centers, planting flags of reified freedom. The public university calls for a return, if not the consummation of the militant scholar[2] for an awakening unknown even to student protestors forty years ago. The public university system may very well drag along the vast and seemingly dead student body as an atrophied appendage; its professors may very well subscribe to cynicism rather than reform, dare they say revolution. The public institution might be on artificial life-support, but it is not brain dead.


If you are in the NYC area this Friday and Saturday…

Yay! CUNY is hosting the C. Wright Mills ‘Taking it Big’ conference… very exciting.

Held in the CUNY Graduate Center Recital Hall, this conference celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mills’ Sociological Imagination; guests include my prof, Stephen Eric Bronner of Rutgers University.It’s uber-cheap to get in. I’m going to do some background reading before the conference, but this is going to be great! Expect to get some entries on this one…

For more information or to register please contact:

Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309

Phone: 212-817-2001  |  Email: greenbergandrew@gmail.com

(Here’s a cut and paste of the line-up):

Friday October 16th

10:00 to 12:00

Intellectuals

Panelists: Russell Jacoby

John Summers

1:00 to 3:00

Class and Power

Panelists: Jerry Watts

Andy Greenberg

3:15 to 5:15:

Culture

Panelists: Marshall Berman

Harvey Molotch

Saturday October 17th

10:00 to 12:00

Sociology and Psychoanalysis

Panelists: Lynn Chancer

Eli  Zaretsky

1:00 to 3:00

Social and Political Theory

Panelists:  Stephen Bronner

David Harvey

3:15 to 5:15:

Politics and Political Writings

Panelists: Stanley Aronowitz

Daniel Geary

Some comments on Communiqué from an Absent Future

The question is, should a radical pamphlet  leave open the possibility of revolution without defining its terms?

The writing Communiqué from an Absent Future offers some interesting comments on student structures in the American University, as well as a detailed critique of other student movements in Europe (with a brief mention of “The Poverty of Student Life”).

I found myself saying, yes, yes, yes… what? At once, the writing points out that the form and content of a given movement must be aligned in order for successful revolutionary practices to occur (siting Greece as a model) while also stating that reformist movements often give ways to revolutionary moments in form (siting the anti CPE movement in France). The primary limitation, then, are the terms of reform and the reader (as well as the author) are lead to prescribe to a moment of spontaneous revolution….

but the ‘communist’ part seems to have slipped out of the demand.

So, from social critique to implication of specific political revolution, forgive me if I find the document to fall a little flat. In the sense that this piece is to incite the immediate and radical blockage of public university spaces, as well as spontaneous fraternization (and, implicitly, education, no?), the text does not act as a revolutionary pamphlet in the capacity that it highlight specifically desired outcomes. This is more a call for anarchy than a call for Communist rebellion.

This is not to say that I don’t appreciate Marx’s (and others’) attempts to keep their writings in the open realm of philosophy and rhetoric to be used as a blueprint at more specific epochs. But we do not need another Thesis on Feuerbach, nor another totalizing manifesto.

I would argue that defining desired outcomes is *not* reformist (and assuming that reforms are inherently irrevelant to paving the path for revolution is problematic) but responsible. For we have reached the moment in need of concrete, site-specific activities, and while fragmented revolutionary activities are revolutionary, they cannot have long-standing cohesiveness nor effectiveness.

But, perhaps I am mistaken. That’s all for now.

While reading Foucault, thinking of Austen

Reading MF seems useful in terms of literary theory in the sense that makes interesting the traditions of 18-20th century sexuality and gender relations. I think it will be especially interesting in application to Austen’s work, which I will reread in my 350 seminar, Sense and Sensibility.

(Part of me wonders, is this novel of Austen’s the pinnacle of her writing as a political author? I’m saying political to stand for gender as well as class, in this instance. I’ve read this novel at least three times, and love it less and less, and cherish it all the more upon each dissection. Perhaps it is because these relationships are most obvious? But then again, I don’t know if I can say that is all together true; Mansfield Park offers some very strong class-oriented analysis. Hhmf.

Austen has inadvertantly become the topic of this posting… whatever!

If my memory serves me correctly, Sense and Sensibility’s “outcome” of plot is one of the strongest in terms of securing the female as the slave-property of man, whereas other Austen novels tend to fend for “love” in a more naive celebration. But… this leads me to another offshoot [and perhaps back to MF]: where’s the love, after all?)

Contemporary popular culture praises Austen as an author of love, as an author of the heart. (Even a ridiculously untrue movie was made, much to the chagrin of Keira Knightley, who was not chosen to play the title role.) But, in reading these novels repetitiously (as one is inclined to do as an English major), one finds that there has never been love, nor has there ever existed any exchange between relations or suitors or social elders other than the euphemistic exchange of goods for sex? Perhaps today’s perpetuation of love is the most effective way of reifying Austen’s work as justification of contemporary relationships and social-sexual networks. Because maybe this backward glace is nothing more than a historical experience of duplication…

Getting back to MF; what was his intent? I do understand the structuralist approach to his works and writings, but I think it falls flat at really “saying something.” And so I’m wondering if I should read his essays and think “that’s nice, I’ll put this to use in Sense and Sensibility? Or should I pose the question what caused MF to pose this question at the cultural epoch that he did; a question and explication that was seemingly rooted in the 19th century?

Basically, I wonder how I can take MF and escape to a very broad framing for a moment, in order to “move forward.”

 

Signing off,

 

b

Upon re-reading:

I feel that my most recent post and my first are, in fact, very intimately connected. 

My overarching question: does new media poetry showcase an erosion of form? In what ways is this aesthetic acheived?
- Place sonnet, free verse, and new media poem side by side; discuss the elements and limits of the universal opposition within a ‘traditional’ context of poetic form.

I feel that this section of the essay will be a very long one, and for good reason. Though I am very anxious about properly undwinding it in such a short number of pages. 

After this detailed explication of Marcuse (perhaps supplemented by other thinkers) I would like to dicuss the possibility of the different poetic forms and how new media poetry attempts to ‘restructure’ or reconfigure the effects that a traditional poem usually sets out in the formal structure of the two-dimensional poem.

…Things are beginning to get a little tricky.

 

It’s been a difficult challenge to find a good sonnet online that’s unpublished. I will appeal to higher sources.